Not so new any more, but never posted: my excavation of an early Bronze Age reopened grave in eastern Austria

As part of my post-doc project on ‘the microtaphonomy of reopened graves’ (at the OREA Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences) I excavated a reopened grave from the early Bronze Age period (so-called Wieselburg Culture) in eastern Austria to investigate what we can learn about reopened graves if we focus on the evidence of the reopening.

For the excavation and analysis I use a multi-dimensional approach: single-finds recording (collaborating with our research group Quaternary Archaeology), sedimentanalysis, micromorphology, archaeothanatology.

Excavations took about 2 months because – lucky me – the grave was particularly deep and contained two inhumations: a first body was buried in a coffin at the bottom of the grave pit, then the grave was reopened and a second body was placed on top. The photo shows the remains of the bottom burial which was reopened. The boxes are Kubiena tins for micromorphological soil samples. Analysis is still ongoing.